How WWII and the old Turkish mass standard led a Greek to a scientific career

Abstract

I was born in a small village near Olympia, on the western coast of Peloponnese, Greece, destined to become a farmer like my father and his father before him. However, WWII changed the course of my life in a profound way. The occupying Italian and German forces confiscated many of the farmers’ crops to feed their troops. Later, angered by the continuous Greek armed resistance, they began to burn the farmers’ fields in retaliation. As a consequence, my frustrated father decided to relocate our small family to Athens, taking advantage of the Red Cross distribution of Canadian wheat to the starving Greeks. Thus, my siblings and I grew up in the heart of the Athens slums full of excountry folk like us. The Greek misery continued even after WWII, due to the equally devastating Greek civil war, pitting the communists against the conservatives who were supported by the British and Americans, and lasting until 1949. When I was 8 y old, my father became a green grocer, selling his vegetables in a small stall in the central Athens market. I spent all of my after-school hours and all day Saturday helping my father in his business. At that time, and until 1959, Greece used the old Turkish “oka” as a mass standard (a remnant of the 400-year occupation of Greece by the Ottoman Empire). An oka was divided into 400 drams, a dram being equivalent to 3.2 g today. To further complicate things, an oka was divided into =2, =4, 1/8, 1/10, and 1/25 fractions. My task was not only to weigh the buyer’s groceries using the appropriate weight standards, but also to determine the price based on their weight. Because speed meant more grocery sales, I quickly became proficient in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. This mastery of “baby math” at a relatively young age gave me confidence in my abilities, and later enabled me to win a competition, thereby earning me a full scholarship at Athens College High School, the best private high school in Greece. At Athens College, one of my favorite professors was Tom Richardson, who was a Fulbright scholar and a graduate of Amherst College in Massachusetts. Richardson was my chemistry professor, a knowledgeable and effective teacher, who instilled in me a passion for doing exact, experimental science. Based mostly on his recommendation, I was awarded a full scholarship as an undergraduate at Amherst. Although I majored in physics at Amherst College, I worked throughout my undergraduate years, including summers, as a laboratory assistant to retired biology professor Harold Henry Plough, in order to earn pocket money and to support myself during school recesses. Plough was a multifaceted scientist. He obtained his PhD degree in 1917 at Columbia University working in the Drosophila lab of T. H. Morgan. Plough’s scientific life was closely interwoven with that of Hermann “Joe” Muller, a fellow graduate student in the Morgan laboratory. According to Plough, who was one of the few who befriended him, Muller was as brilliant in science as he was Costa Georgopoulos, Research Professor, Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah.